April 2009 Archives

From the Miami Herald:

Calling the death of Gabriel Myers a ''suicide'' lets his killers off the hook.

The 7-year-old was propelled by a vast conspiracy of abuse and neglect and malpractice. The boy only finished the job on April 15, when he locked himself in the bathroom of his Margate foster home and coiled a shower hose around his neck.

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The drugs, which come with a long and sobering list of possible side effects in children, have been doled out to troublesome kids to make them more manageable. Eli Lilly was fined $1.4 billion -- that's billion with a B -- in March for nefariously marketing the unauthorized use of Zyprexa for children, despite the known risks. A big chunk of those kids, like Gabriel, were foster kids, whose lives by definition were inflicted with the kind of trauma apt to cause unruly behavior.

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Foster kids were essentially guinea pigs in a vast, public-financed drug experiment.

 . . . .

Absent a parent, a judge must give the OK for psychotropics. But the courts and case workers from the Department of Children & Families are all too overwhelmed by caseloads and beset by budget cuts to spend time contesting a doctor's judgment.

''No one was looking out for Gabriel.''

What Gabriel got, instead of real help, were powerful adult drugs laden with dangerous side effects. His cause of death was listed as suicide. It was just another misdiagnosis.

As social work has developed into an increasingly seasoned, mature, and specialized profession, the role of the social worker has also changed. So too is the expectation that social workers will ensure that they are satisfying all legal responsibilities owed to their clients. Although many public sector social work administrators and practitioners are concerned about liability litigation and qualified immunity, no national studies of appellate cases have been published. This study explores when social workers are and are not successful in asserting qualified immunity when sued in civil court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.

Guest Feature Article by Karen Rothschild, Esq. and Daniel Pollack, MSW, JD

7 YO FL foster child on judicially approved psychotropic drug cocktail commits suicide - guardian objected to meds Link

Apparently strip searching is IN and sexting is OUT. Students take heed: adult school administrators have the Constitutional right to force you to remove your bra, panties and boxers anytime for almost any reason, but if you take a cell phone picture of it, you can be charged with producing child pornography with a ten year mandatory minimum in the federal pen.

Yesterday the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in a case we've been following since last summer, Safford Unified School District v. Redding, No. 08-479. Early indications are that the Court will follow its traditional pattern in cases involving schools and drugs by giving school officials broad discretion in their supervisory role over students.

Justice David Souter indicated that law and order must prevail when he said at one point, "My thought process is, I would rather have the kid embarrassed by a strip search, if we can't find anything short of that, than to have some other kids dead because the stuff is distributed at lunchtime and things go awry."

The school district's lawyer Matthew Wright argued that "searching any place where she might be reasonably hiding that contraband was constitutionally permissible" because of the schools' primary role in keeping students safe. "It's not like a criminal issue where they're trying to prosecute. This is a case where they're trying to protect," Wright said. "It is best for this Court to defer to their judgment . . . and not second-guess those rules."

But Souter, noting that the drug in question in the search of middle school student Savanna Redding was only ibuprofen, surmised, “At some point it gets silly, Having an aspirin tablet does not present a health and safety risk.”

And Justice Antonin Scalia asked if, under Wright's logic, authorities would be justified in conducting a prison-style body cavity search of students.

At first Wright rejected the suggestion. "That is something the Court can clearly say is off-limits" in part because school officials are not trained to conduct such searches. But in the end he conceded that legally speaking, "I could see that result," though he said local school boards would not allow body cavity searches.

Given this logic, it won't be long before the National School Boards Association will be crafting model rules for student strip searches and the American Association of School Administrators will be training staff on how to conduct "prison-style" body cavity searches.

Just remember kids, when someone appears from the principal's office trying to protect you, you better put down your cell phone and take off your clothes. The Constitution requires no less.

The Court's decision is expected by this summer.

"Highly reputed successful" CT lawyer & Bar leader sentenced to 5 years for running website selling child porn Link

FBI sexting? FBI employees charged w/spying on underaged girls in dressing room during prom dress charity event Link

A gold star for rural NY Sheriff Dennis John and CAC Director Karen Hill for keeping it real on child sex abuse Link

Last days of adoption? Great series on adoption by Wash Times reporter Cheryl Wetzstein Link

USSC prev Forest Grove v. T.A. - must SpEd student enroll in public school b4 unilateral private school placement? Link

Just one more example of how individuals intent on exploiting children are leveraging technology: maybe it was the bird in his pocket or his tattered clothes which were covered with avian feces, but when a 58 year old man arrived at an Indianapolis hospital to pick up his twin medically fragile girls, nurses were concerned that he did not seem to know how to care for the children and planned to drive them back to New Jersey by himself.

The girls, Karen and Kathy Melinger, were born in 2005 from a South Carolina surrogate using a sperm donor and delivered in an Indiana hospital at the direction of an attorney who brokered the arrangement over the Internet. There was no Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC) because the so-called father, who had to adopt the girls, was temporarily living in Indiana waiting for the adoption to finalize before moving back to New Jersey.

Stephen Melinger, who moved to New Jersey from the Bronx in New York, is a single man and teacher’s aid at Roosevelt Elementary School in Union City. The adoption was approved in 2006 in a rural Indiana court where the surrogate's attorney, Steven C. Litz (who $olicit$ client$ and $urrogate mother$ on the Internet) completed over 20 adoption$ before the $ame judge in the la$t $everal year$.

Now, four years later, Indiana's highest court reversed a lower court ruling that let the New Jersey man adopt the twin girls. The Indiana Supreme Court unanimously said a county court shouldn't have granted the adoption without input from New Jersey officials.

But it let Melinger retain custody of the girls, born in April 2005, until the matter is settled. The ruling means New Jersey child welfare authorities now must assess whether Melinger, who is in his 60s, can provide a safe and stable home for the girls.

The Indianapolis Star repeatedly fought for information about this case and kept up public pressure for years. Their coverage of this story is excellent.

US Dept of Ed releases new guidance on interrelationship between Section 504, the ADA, and the IDEA Link

Safford v. Redding U.S. Supreme Court preview - legality of middle school student strip search for ibuprofen Link

According to Law Professor Marci Hamilton:

Jewish and Catholic clergy are squaring off over legislation in New York State to reform statute of limitation laws for childhood sexual abuse. In this case, let's root for the rabbis - because if they win, the real winners will be victims who have been foreclosed from seeking justice against their perpetrators for far too many years.

The bill in question is the Child Victims Act. Scheduled to shortly go before the New York state Legislature, it would extend the statutes of limitations by five years for child sex abuse prosecution and civil claims. Further, it would also open a one-year "window" to allow victims whose time for going to court had previously expired because of the limitations to re-enter the justice system and file claims during this set period.

California and Delaware recently enacted legislation that has revealed almost 400 new child predators.

When the victims name the adults who made the abuse happen, and courts order the release of evidence and documents that have shielded the ugly truth from the people, New Yorkers can finally protect children from the dangerous and the callous.

All concientious New York citizens should write a letter to their State Representative and State Senator supporting the Child Victims Act: Assembly Bill A.2596 / Senate Bill S.2568 without amendment.

Go to www.sol-reform.com for additional details.

MySpace content not private - CA Appeals Court rules blog can be republished in newspaper without invading privacy Link

Chinese adoption = human trafficking inside and outside the country according to the NYTimes Link

National Foster Parent Assoc (NFPA) annual tax guide for foster & adoptive parents & kinship caregivers Link

Cybersafety Queen Parry Aftab leads national effort to make sexting a federal crime Link

No surprise here: legislation requiring any juvenile who appears in court to be represented by a lawyer would be unconstitutional according to PA Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald Castille.

This is PA's official judicial response to the Luzerne County PA scandal in which former Common Pleas judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan pleaded guilty in February to taking $2.6 million in bribes to put juveniles in private detention centers. Hundreds of youngsters were sent to facilities without the benefit of legal counsel.

State Senator Lisa Baker, a Republican who represents part of Luzerne County, perhaps said it best (in comments which could apply to many governmental institutions in her state and elsewhere):

"Everyone fervently hopes the Luzerne County mess is an appalling anomaly, Yet, too many eyes were averted, too many voices were held silent, too many people were intimidated, too many troubling statistics were discounted, too many warning signs were ignored for people to accept the argument this cannot happen again. What we announce today is a start, to remedy injustice and to reform a system that lacks sufficient openness or oversight to prevent corruption."

Castille's Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit in January filed by the Juvenile Law Center which requested relief for juveniles who appeared in a Luzerne County courtroom without lawyers. So much for official oversight.

Asked if the Supreme Court should have recognized the problem earlier, Castille said no. "We're not an investigative body."

Castille then ironically pledged "to the citizens of Pennsylvania that the Supreme Court will do all in its power to ensure that justice is done fairly and honestly in Luzerne County and in every courtroom in this Commonwealth every day."

How he plans on "ensuring justice" without investigatory powers or court appointed counsel is anyone's guess.

Corrupt PA juvenile judge claims "judicial privilege" shields him from lawsuits for illegal juvenile prison terms Link